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Show DEATHS DUE TO TRESPASS Fatalities on Railroad Lines, Caused by Carelessness, Constantly Show a Substantial Increase. Fatalities In railroad accidents bo far as passengers are concerned have decreased in this country. Several of the most important railroad lines in their campaign for safety have been able to announce that no deaths have resulted to travelers upon their roads for periods ranging fiom one to five years. Fatalities to trespassers, however, how-ever, have increased proportionally seven times as much as have deaths of passengers. A recent report gives the number of trespassers killed last year as 5,471, and for the preceding 25 years as 113,480. This appalling figure repre-seuts repre-seuts 53 per cent of all the railroad fatalities in the United States. This percentage is remarkwbly constant. As the Railway As Gazette expresses ex-presses it: "The more railroads there are and the more trains there are run the greater is the hazard that they will kill persona who persist in walking on the track, and apparently the more people there are in the United States the more trespassers there are." The railroads have endeavored to have the states act and have also attempted at-tempted to deal with it themselves. They have policed their tracks and have arrested trespassers, but according accord-ing to the court records these persons went unpunished because the judges refused to convict them and local authorities au-thorities refused to stand the expense of their imprisonment. At a meeting of the Association of Railroad Superintendents in San Francisco E. W. Camp said that his efforts to interest various state legislatures legis-latures in a bill to make trespassing a misdemeanor were in almost every case futile. Where it received any favor it all the bill was made almost inoperative by limitation. One instance in-stance that he mentioned was a proviso pro-viso that it "should not apply to pickets pick-ets during a strike." |